Feral camels, deadly crashes: Can Australia tame its remote Outback Way?

<p text="A few miles from the KGL mine sits the small Aboriginal community of Bonya. As in other Aboriginal towns along the Outback Way, its 80 or so residents hope asphalt will help close the huge gap in living standards that plagues the country.” class=”wpds-c-hcZlgz wpds-c-hcZlgz-bkfjoi-font-georgia wpds-c-hcZlgz-jDmrXh-width-mdCenter wpds-c-hcZlgz-iPJLV-css”>A few miles from the KGL mine sits the small Aboriginal community of Bonya. As in other Aboriginal towns along the Outback Way, its 80 or so residents hope asphalt will help close the huge gap in living standards that plagues the country.

<p text="The challenge is immense. From here, the closest town is two hours away. Heavy rains turn the road into mud. Strong storms knock out the electricity. There is no cellular reception, and the sole phone booth also fails occasionally. There is an emergency call box at Bonya’s health clinic. But a nurse only comes to town once a week.” class=”wpds-c-hcZlgz wpds-c-hcZlgz-bkfjoi-font-georgia wpds-c-hcZlgz-jDmrXh-width-mdCenter wpds-c-hcZlgz-iPJLV-css”>The challenge is immense. From here, the closest town is two hours away. Heavy rains turn the road into mud. Strong storms knock out the electricity. There is no cellular reception, and the sole phone booth also fails occasionally. There is an emergency call box at Bonya’s health clinic. But a nurse only comes to town once a week.

“If someone is having a heart attack, it takes you two hours to get out here,” nurse Katie Singh said as she opened the clinic one morning.

Singh, who is Aboriginal, started the day by checking in with her usual patients. A few months earlier, a 4-year-old girl had fallen seriously ill late at night. Doctors wouldn’t evacuate her by plane, and Alice Springs — the nearest city, four hours away — couldn’t spare one of its few ambulances. So Singh and her husband drove to Bonya, stabilized the child and then took her to a hospital in Alice, where she spent several days.

<p text="Few in town can afford the four-wheel-drive vehicles necessary to safely travel the road. Even those who can have disaster stories. Della George was taking her SUV to the mechanic in Alice when the wheel came off. She had little water and no food with her, and it was seven hours before someone from Jervois happened by just before sunset.” class=”wpds-c-hcZlgz wpds-c-hcZlgz-bkfjoi-font-georgia wpds-c-hcZlgz-jDmrXh-width-mdCenter wpds-c-hcZlgz-iPJLV-css”>Few in town can afford the four-wheel-drive vehicles necessary to safely travel the road. Even those who can have disaster stories. Della George was taking her SUV to the mechanic in Alice when the wheel came off. She had little water and no food with her, and it was seven hours before someone from Jervois happened by just before sunset.

“I nearly spent the night on the road,” the 28-year-old said. “I was scared.”

The road puts a heavy burden on cattle stations.

“If something happens out front of your property, you’re the first responder,” said Kiya Gill, who owns Jervois cattle station with her husband. Many tourists simply plug “Alice Springs” into Google Maps and take the quickest route, assuming it’s paved, she said. But locals have a saying about this section of the Outback Way, which is called the Plenty Highway.

“Plenty of rocks, plenty of cows, plenty of camels and plenty of bull dust,” she said, referring to the soft and treacherous red dirt.

Any journey can become a life-or-death risk. For Jade Connolly, it happened on Jan. 5, 2019, as she drove near Jervois with her two youngest children. The family had only been in the Northern Territory for a few months but knew how bad the roads were because they had a contract for maintaining them. The next day, Jade’s husband was supposed to grade this stretch.

She heard a strange sound and felt the SUV shudder. A few seconds later, she remembers, the steering wheel locked in her hands and suddenly the car flipped. She’d been going about 50 miles per hour. Both she and her son were ejected.

<p text="“I woke up thinking I hit a camel,” she said. As she drifted in and out of consciousness, she could hear Steven calling out for her from a few feet away.” class=”wpds-c-hcZlgz wpds-c-hcZlgz-bkfjoi-font-georgia wpds-c-hcZlgz-jDmrXh-width-mdCenter wpds-c-hcZlgz-iPJLV-css”>“I woke up thinking I hit a camel,” she said. As she drifted in and out of consciousness, she could hear Steven calling out for her from a few feet away.

A family from Bonya stopped and tried to help, as did her 9-year-old daughter, who had been in the back seat and was not seriously injured. The ambulance that ultimately arrived took them to Jervois, where Connolly was put on a pool table and given blood infusions. It was there, shortly before she was flown to a hospital, that her husband told her: “We lost Stevie.”

The sweet boy with Asperger’s syndrome, who loved the army so much he thanked strangers for their service, died of internal bleeding. Connolly suffered a broken back, pelvis, arm, leg, sternum and eye socket. She spent seven weeks in the hospital and attended her son’s funeral on a stretcher.

She later learned that the rough road had snapped the studs on one of the SUV’s wheels, causing it to come off. Investigators, however, accused her of speeding and failing to put a seat belt on her son. They charged her with culpable driving causing death, punishable by up to a decade in prison, despite her insistence that the seat belts both she and Steven were wearing malfunctioned. Nearly two years later, authorities dropped all charges. The Northern Territory government declined to provide a copy of the crash report.

<p text="We visited Connolly at her mother-in-law’s house near Alice Springs. The former barrel racer now walks with a pronounced limp. At 42, her body is a collection of titanium rods and scars, one of which is tattooed with an “S” for Steven.” class=”wpds-c-hcZlgz wpds-c-hcZlgz-bkfjoi-font-georgia wpds-c-hcZlgz-jDmrXh-width-mdCenter wpds-c-hcZlgz-iPJLV-css”>We visited Connolly at her mother-in-law’s house near Alice Springs. The former barrel racer now walks with a pronounced limp. At 42, her body is a collection of titanium rods and scars, one of which is tattooed with an “S” for Steven.

Her husband finds it too difficult to say their son’s name, let alone talk about the tragedy. She blames it on the seat belts that didn’t work and the air bags that didn’t inflate and the steering wheel that locked.

And the road.